They’re also making their code available to other developers and encouraging them to incorporate Instant Lab compatibility into their own apps. “This basic functionality can get expanded to manual settings of exposure time and brightness, filters, image editing, etc.,” they told me. The Impossible team told me that the app will override the user’s brightness settings, ensuring a perfect exposure, but hinted that they’ll allow users the freedom to experiment. When we realized how well the first prototypes worked, it dawned on us that this actually may become a great product in it’s own right.” The final design of the Instant Lab was headed by Achim Heine of HLZ, Berlin, who’s previously done work for Leica, among others. “Using our iPhones often to snap photos we were looking for a possibility how to free them from the screen. “It was on our journey towards a new Impossible analog instant camera when we came across the idea of the Instant Lab,” the Impossible team told me. The spark actually came as they were developing their own Polaroid camera. It’s like a portable, Ziggaurat-shaped darkroom for your iPhone.īut the Impossible team hadn’t set out to make a printer. An accompanying app flashes your desired image onto an unexposed Polaroid down below, and instantly the printer spits out a Polaroid print of your smartphone snapshot. You pull a 6-inch telescopic tower up from the Instant Lab’s base and put your iPhone in a snug little cradle, face-down. But the printer’s solution to the analog/digital divide straddles the line between comically backwards and genuinely clever. It’s about 2.5 inches thick, so it’s not going in any pockets, but it’s definitely small enough to slip in a bag. The device itself, dubbed the Impossible Instant Lab, is a plastic square that vaguely resembles one of the fold-up Polaroid cameras of old. It’s a collapsible photo printer that lets you turn any iPhone photo into a Polaroid print in seconds. But if making a viable business out of tiny, so-so quality photographs in an era of ubiquitous smartphone cameras seemed impossible, the outfit’s latest effort is equally unlikely. So they bought some machines and a building from Polaroid, hired a small team of its most fanatical former employees, and started The Impossible Project, an effort to produce new instant film for old school Polaroid cameras.
Florian Kaps, an enthusiast of all things instant photography, and André Bosman, a former manager at Polaroid, met for the first time and quickly found common ground: Neither thought the world was quite ready to let the iconic instant film go. In 2008, at the closing of a Polaroid factory in Enschede, The Netherlands, Dr.
The Impossible Project’s Instant Lab photo printer is just wacky enough to make sense.
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